The distance between the real town of Taborton in Upstate New York and the television town of Twin Peaks in the Pacific Northwest can't be measured in miles. But it can be measured in terms of the imagination of Mark Frost. Frost, David Lynch's collaborator on the twisted and moody ABC soap opera, "Twin Peaks," spent his summers at his family's vacation home in Taborton when he was growing up.

TV or not TV. . . . PIQUED: Let's put it this way: TV viewers will remember "Twin Peaks" a lot longer than the standard-issue Emmy Awards show that ignored and humiliated it Sunday night. What an irony: Here's the august Academy of Television Arts & Sciences slapping down a true breakout show at the very moment the TV industry is starting a new season boasting that it's offering viewers fresh new program ideas. And what show influenced that new direction most? Why, "Twin Peaks," of course.

When director David Lynch assembled the staff for the quirky television series "Twin Peaks," the founders of Propaganda Films were obvious choices. Steve Golin and Sigurjon Sighvatsson made their reputations by producing stylistically adventurous music videos, so their visions were as compatible as coffee and doughnuts. The rest is pop culture history, as far as "Twin Peaks" is concerned. But the partnership did not end there.

It is no secret that David Lynch, the writer-director-composer-painter, has an unusual relationship with Bob's Big Boy. For seven years in the 1980s he ate lunch there every day, ordering cup after cup of over-sweetened coffee and a single chocolate milkshake while scribbling notes on Bob's little square napkins.

Only minutes after last Thursday night's episode of ABC's "Twin Peaks," a call came in from Berkeley. "I just wanted to get the jump on the competition," said the breathless caller, determined to be the first to enlighten me about a crucial clue. "The insurance man who called on Catherine Martell tonight was named Mr. Neff," he said. Yes? "Well, the insurance man that Fred MacMurray played in the 1944 movie 'Double Indemnity' was named Walter Neff." Of course. Of course !

First question: Can this be happening? Second question: Can this be happening on television? Answers: Yes and yes. That's because ABC has become the closest thing the United States has to Channel Four Television, the enterprising British network that regards TV as a laboratory with foaming-over beakers and test tubes, not as a rest home for tired ideas. The latest and best evidence of that is the two-hour pilot for "Twin Peaks," which airs at 9 p.m.

Fred Reed claims that most of this city's bowlers checked out early this week from his Mt. Si bowling lanes to watch ABC's "Twin Peaks" when it made its debut Sunday night, followed by the series start Thursday. The new murder mystery series, created by "Blue Velvet" director David Lynch, was filmed in part in Snoqualmie, a logging town 25 miles east of Seattle hard by Snoqualmie Falls.

For a series so widely acknowledged as a television landmark, David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" has received conspicuously shoddy treatment on the home-video front. The eight-episode first season was released in 2001 without the pilot; the second (and final) season arrived on DVD only last spring after extensive delays.

Now comes another twist in the saga of "Twin Peaks," the cult soap opera that was blanked in major categories presented on Sunday's Emmy Awards telecast. According to three panelists on the jury of peers that selected best director of a drama series, the question of whether the blockbuster two-hour pilot of "Twin Peaks" should have been included in the same category as four regular one-hour episodes of other series was discussed.

You've got your cup of hot java, your cherry pie, your schematic diagrams of all last spring's episodes of "Twin Peaks." Now you're ready for the start of another year. But wait, do you have the newsletter? After all, more than 600 people do. "Six Hundred," mutters Steve Ryan, author of the newsletter and a man who expected to attract, at best, maybe 150 subscribers.